Our Life, Love and Pursuit of Happiness… (and home renovations)

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For the past year and a bit we haven’t had an oven. Shortly after we moved in it died and we have been using the BBQ and microwave/toaster oven since. We didn’t register for one but Harrison obviously heard me complain about it many times and so as our wedding gift..he got us a new oven. We had it delivered and installed last week and finally got to test it out this weekend.

The trusty installer guys trying to make it flush with the wall in my extremely unleveled kitchen.

Garret’s thumb of approval as he made us breakfast today.
The oven is roughly 20 years newer than the previous one and it just looks so much nicer in the kitchen. I can also finally use all of the baking stuff I got as wedding gifts! Can’t wait for some upcoming Christmas baking 🙂

My mum sent me this recipe last week and I made it on Tuesday. Garret and I are big meat fans, but I didn’t feel like meat was missing from this veggie chili (although I’m not sure if he would say the same…) You could add a ton of other veggies to bulk it up as well!

sour cream and chopped cilantro and green onion to garnish. I used grated cheese and plain Greek yogurt

Heat oil, saute onion, pepper and garlic for about 5 min. stir in chili, cumin and oregano, cook just until spices heat through and become fragrant, a minute or two. Stir in lentils and tomatoes, Add potato, chipotle pepper (if using)
Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, stirring until potatoes are tender…about 15 minutes. (I had to leave it longer than 15 minutes to get the potatoes to my liking)

Last week we noticed some tell tale signs that we had some furry guests back in the house. Likely relatives of Sneakers who we had to encourage to move out last year. We put some anti mouse goodies down over the weekend in the hopes that they would get the hint and leave/die. Yesterday morning we noticed that something had taken all of it and we had a bit of a mixed reaction. Garret and I are both rather large hearted people, so we don’t really like the idea of hurting something, but we aren’t really of the “mice can be trapped and released into the wild” mentality either. We had a moment of silence for the little critters and G made a joke that he feels bad, like we are killing Fievel.

We established that we don’t want any furry roommates that steal our food and poop in our kitchen so we had to be strong and get rid of them anyway. We put more stuff down and went to bed.

As I have mentioned before we are sleeping on the couch still while work gets done upstairs. (side note: G finished sealing the floors last night so we can get back to bed sleeping like normal people tonight yay) Once all the lights were out, G fell asleep in 7 seconds and I lay awake listening to some serious scurrying activities. Gross. From the sounds of things they were less Fievel-esque and more like an ROUS:

Rodent of Unusual Size anyone?

It makes me MUCH happier to picture their demise when I think of them looking like this. Although it made it harder for me to fall asleep thinking about these guys running around.

I have wanted to try a recipe like this for ages..in fact I bought shells months ago to make something similar and never got around to it. I am putting it on here so I will feel obligated to try it and let you know if it is any good or not. I found the recipe here. As I mentioned yesterday, my father in law is coming to stay for a few days so I need some yummy options for him…he gets suspicious when I try to feed him too much quinoa

It seems that my little house blog took a serious turn for wedding rambling for a while there…now that that is over let me enthral you with our upcoming home reno plans:

Since we took such a time out on the house to focus on summer plans, wedding planning and general non house related life stuff, our home to do plans over the next few months are extensive! We are both big socializers and seem to always have weekend plans, so we decided to make more time during the week to at least push things forward a little. We can easily allot a few hours after work to painting and other house fixing related tasks. We are also going to try to not book both weekend days with plans for a while, so we have some more time to try to accomplish things. The past year and a bit in the house has taught us one lesson: everything takes twice as long as you think it will!

We finished our dining room a few months ago (except for the lighting) and we take so much satisfaction out of how nice that room looks. I want that feeling everywhere else in our home. So….this weekend we are planning to finish painting the living room ceiling and the walls where we removed the crown moulding (Garret has been skim coating and sanding this week so we should be good to go) He is DYING to start the brickwork on the one wall, so that might get kicked off as well. Once the living room is done we are going to (and not necessarily in this order):

1. Put the trim up on the other side of the door in the downstairs washroom

2. Backsplash in the kitchen. We have been putting WAY too much thought into it, we just need to pick something and go with it.

3. Fix the hole in the ceiling in the kitchen that was cut to change out the wiring. (it is so small that we keep forgetting it’s there, but it would be nice to have that DONE)

4. Paint the staircase and railing. The top banister requires some serious sanding though, it would appear the previous owner had a beaver who cut his baby teeth on the fop railing.

5. Put a runner down the stairs

6. New light fixture and fix ceiling in entrance hall (maybe this is two separate items?!)

7. Finish painting our room and guest room–we have colours chosen already we just need to get at it

8. Install the new hardwood flooring we bought upstairs (I will be sucking up to my Father in Law tonight to see when he can come help! )

9. Install three new doors upstairs (two bedrooms and the bathroom) The existing doors are AWFUL. The guest bedroom door gets stuck all the time, the gap in the bathroom door would be perfect for a peeping tom, and our bedroom door doesn’t even close!

There are a billion and one other items on our list, but I feel like this is hefty enough to keep us going for the fall/winter. I also need to throw in: organize basement and build closet type fake built ins around our bed, but don’t let me get ahead of myself! One of my girlfriends might be coming to live with us for a few weeks in October so I feel like getting the guest room sorted out might be the top of our priority list.. I will keep you posted on how things go.

Over Family Day my father in law Kevin spent the weekend at our place helping Garret insulate the basement. I took this picture during their morning coffee break. I’ll do a post soon showing all the exciting (and super dirty/dusty) work they got up to!

Nothing exciting happened around the house last night as we were at the gym. So in keeping with the whole posting every day thing I’m going to share a slow cooker recipe I made Sunday that we had for dinner last night!Chicken Tortilla Soup
(Crock pot edition)

*chicken breasts cut into bite size pieces (I was lazy and just ripped the meat off a BBQ chicken from Zehrs)
*jar of salsa (as spicy as you like)
*tin of black beans
*carton of chicken stock (but since I’m working on my Suzy Homemaker merit badge I used homemade stock)
*a few handfuls of frozen corn
*tin of green chilies (optional)
*tin of diced tomatoes

–Throw all this into slowcooker…top with chips, shredded cheese and cilantro (could also top with guacamole, sour cream etc)

I cooked it on high for the day…and served it with some crushed up nacho chips, chopped cilantro and shredded light cheese on top. Super yummy! I love this recipe because you could throw pretty much anything in with it and it would be delicious.